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User blog:Concernedalien11780/Hello, Boondocks fans!
Hello, Boondocks fans, this is Concernedalien11780. I have been a Boondocks fan ever since I saw the ad for "The New Black", oddly enough the last episode. I became curious to see the episode, and after watching it, I thought it was pretty good. Then I learned the show's history and watched every episode and decided that, along with most of Season 4, the episode wasn't too good. While it was interesting in premise and one of the few shows willing to bluntly criticize political correctness and how it restricts free speech at times, it was much better in concept than execution. It somehow played into the long-standing homophobia within many black communities by trying to make those who care about gay rights look stupid, and not just the people at Yes Homo, which was a fictionalized version of GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, alongside SAAAD, the Specially Able Alliance Against Defamation (where did Angela Nissel and Rodney Barnes hear "specially able" as a politically correct alternative to "handicapped", "cognitively impaired", or "retarded"?) as a parody of the Special Olympics, but that's another issue entirely. While the depiction of the leader of Yes Homo as an ableist and the conflicting depiction of the leader of SAAAD as a homophobe points out how many activists for one kind of tolerance are often intolerant in another way, it seems pretty ironic that this is happening on this show, considering how, at least on the surface, the Season 4 writers are guilty of the same crime. I think that this concept would've been much better if Aaron McGruder could've worked on it. Unfortunately, due to that dispute about how many episodes would be produced for Adult Swim for Season 4 and Aaron co-creating Black Jesus for Adult Swim, he couldn't even have his name in the credits, let alone work on the show. The first three seasons were some of the funniest, if not the most cathartic, cartoons ever put on TV. Each character is controversial in their own way, and its plots are usually painfully bold. From a two-episode callout of an entire cable network (and for a reason I actually think is pretty sound) to Tyler Perry as a cult leader (which I think he sure acts like) to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself introducing the debate of how can white people respect black people when many people in the black community don't respect themselves, McGruder knew how to rustle feathers in the comic strip and animation worlds. Unfortunately, it was often hard to tell when he was satirizing stereotypes of Black America or reinforcing them, especially when some of its guest stars, like Snoop Dogg, shamelessly profit off of reinforcing black stereotypes for a career. While I don't agree with some of Aaron McGruder's more radical statements, I think he is one of the sharpest satirists ever born, black or otherwise. Uncle Ruckus is the character that makes me laugh the most frequently for all of the reasons Ebony Brown stated in "The Lovely Ebony Brown", yet unfortunately, the general experience of the show, especially the presence of Ruckus, has made me more on-edge mental-racially, taking race into account in my mind when it's not needed, yet obviously never saying anything out loud about race. My favorite episode is probably "The S Word" because it combines all of the show's good qualities, is effectively humorous, and has a message about use of the N words that is much more insightful than even South Park's message in "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson". As a white person living in a predominantely white yet still pretty ethnically diverse neighborhood, with plenty of Hispanic, Asian, black, and even a few Arab-American students during my time at high school, I never had to think much about race until 2013, when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin made the news. Not only because of white privilege, but also because there isn't any real racism in town. The accomplishments of all people are recognized, regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation, as long as they've earned them, in most parts of town that I see. Another town in the county was a base for a branch of the KKK in the 20th century, but that branch has since disbanded. Obviously, just because I don't experience it doesn't mean it isn't real, but it is often hard to believe that the riots and such are even real because of my minimal amount of direct exposure. In middle school, the main bullies that I had to deal with were Hispanic, and a racial element was added to that when I declared my dislike of ghetto culture, making the bullying worse, but other than that, I've never been directly involved in any really bad longstanding racial issue, whether as the victim or instigator. Which is why it confuses me that that "mental on-edge attitude" I mentioned earlier only happens when I'm around black people, but not anyone else of any other race, even other minority races. Maybe it's because African-American skin tone is the most different than Caucasian skin tone of all the different skin tones. Or maybe it's just watching Ruckus. I guess for some people, racism isn't a choice and is a result of what they're exposed to and becomes stuck with them. I always try to come at racial issues from the perspective of the individuals in the situations being people first and their race second, which makes me more right-leaning or left-leaning depending on the issue, but that becomes much harder when even those that are trying to get justice for blacks are judging them by the color of their skin, saying they need justice because they're black rather than just because they were a person that was shot or choked by someone that's supposed to be an authority figure under dubious circumstances. It was excessive pride, not racism, that pushed George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, and Daniel Pantenelo to do what they did to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, respectively. If they had tried Zimmerman for the lesser but more legitimate charges of stalking, harrassment, and manslaughter rather than murder and hate crimes, he would've been convicted. Not for as long as some of the more zealous #BlackLivesMatter activists might like, but he wouldn't have been acquitted. Martin, Brown, and Garner were all imperfect men that did not deserve to die. And Wilson and Pantenelo probably should've, at the very least, had their pay cut for what they did. At least the white-on-black deaths now are truly, well, black and white, with no "accidents" leading to the deaths and just straightforward heinous acts of violence. We actually know who's good and who's bad in these instances, such as Dylann Roof's South Carolina church shooting, in which he's obviously the bad guy. MLK said that he wants his four children to grow up in a nation where they're not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. To me, people acting too proud of themselves for not putting white people in lead roles, creating #OscarsSoWhite hashtags, and wishing Spider-Man were black sounds like judging both blacks and whites by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. While racism will never go away permanently, I think that less people will be racist if we educate the world more on MLK's words and see each other as just people and not skin color or ethnicity rather than treating black people like fragile props that can't handle any criticism and need to be held up on a pedestal above everyone else. I hope to cure that "nurtured negative racial thinking" (I don't want to call it racism because in my case it's not racism per se) of mine that I keep going back to by hiring a fair amount of black people to be in an original animated series I am trying to make. Thanks to this really weird system I use to make decisions, in this case decide the gender, race, and sexual orientation of my protagonists if they're not based on real people, the main protagonist is a black trans boy. I want to make the show for Disney XD, so I may just have to make him a black cis boy, because in spite of Disney trying to include same-sex parents in some of their shows, that's not as hard to immediately explain to kids as being trans. It's too bad that The Boondocks was cancelled just as all the big race-related controversies were happening. I would enjoy hearing Aaron McGruder's takes on the police shootings and Ferguson riots, Bill Cosby and how there's a 98% chance he date-raped every woman he ever worked with, Rachel Dolezal possibly proving the existence of racial identity disorder, whether the Confederate flag being taken down would lead to it being considered insensitive to depict other monuments from the Civil War, and all of the rest. All of the people in comedy today that do talk about the racial issues affecting society are pretty much just rehashing what Al Sharpton says on PoliticsNation with a laugh track. Even South Park has been doing things I don't think Trey Parker and Matt Stone would've done in the mid-2000s, probably because of being bribed to keep things in line with the rest of Comedy Central's programming. Trey and Matt are in their 40s and have families now, so they can't really afford any more controversies affecting them, especially after the "terrorist threats" that were made in response to the 200th and 201st episodes, so that's why they just decided to repackage what John Oliver, in Jon Stewart's place, said about Zimmerman in quasi-bold packaging that looks like South Park and parodied a movie that people stopped caring about by October, which was also when the trial stopped being relevant in the media and they were just filling a quota that CC was making them fill of somewhat controversial news events they believed America would find funny, and while Comedy Central fans found them funny, South Park fans did not. It worked for IGN and the A.V. Club, but that's because IGN doesn't know anything about American social politics, and the A.V. Club is devoted to its prejudices. I would also expect Boondocks to be more clever in its treatment of the Eric Garner death than simply try to depict all cops as racist like "#REHASH" and "#HappyHolograms". If the contract dispute between Aaron and Adult Swim hadn't happened, I think that Boondocks would still be on. I don't know if Black Jesus will get a second season, but for now, we can have the good memories of almost all things McGruder. Thank you for letting me into this community, and as I do with all blog posts in which I talk social politics, I disabled comments on this blog post to avoid flame wars. You probably won't read it all anyway because of just how long it is by now, but just to be safe, comments are disabled. If any of you take issue with anything I said, and you probably will because I'm a white kid from a pretty priviledged background with a few black acquaintences but no close black friends yet a multitude of white, Hispanic, Asian, and Arab friends talking about race on the Internet in a way that some may call ignorant, please contact me on the talk section on my user page. If you ask nicely, I'll even give you my address so that you can come to my house and we can correct each others' ignorance in person. Maybe. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts